Identity Inertia: How AI Is Forcing Us to Reclaim Our Agency
- Rich Washburn
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
For as long as most of us can remember, we’ve been taught to introduce ourselves as our roles. “I’m an accountant.”“I’m an engineer.”“I’m in IT.”
Somewhere along the line, our job titles became our identities. And for decades, that worked fine—because the world moved slowly enough to let us keep up with our own definitions. But AI just broke the speed limit.
Now the skills that defined those roles are evolving faster than we can rewrite our résumés. The ground beneath our identities is shifting—and for the first time in a long time, we’re being forced to confront who we are without the title.
The Great Identity Illusion
We didn’t mean to get stuck in identity inertia—it’s just how we were programmed.Society rewarded predictability. Employers valued specialization. We built comfort around consistency.
But that consistency came at a cost. We stopped seeing ourselves as dynamic learners and started seeing ourselves as static labels. AI is stripping that away—not out of malice, but out of inevitability. It’s showing us that “roles” are really just collections of skills stitched together by circumstance. And when those skills shift, the role dissolves.
That’s not a crisis. That’s an invitation.
AI Isn’t Taking Your Job—It’s Testing Your Curiosity
Here’s the truth: AI isn’t out to replace you. It’s here to expose whether you’re adaptable enough to evolve. The question isn’t “Will AI take my job? ”It’s “Will I reclaim my agency before it does?”
Because what’s coming next isn’t a world divided by who has jobs and who doesn’t.It’s a world divided by who chooses to learn and who waits to be told what to do next.
Curiosity isn’t a luxury skill anymore—it’s survival.Adaptability is the new résumé.
The Subconscious Rebellion
If you’ve noticed a surge of people building in public, launching projects, experimenting with AI tools, sharing half-baked ideas online—that’s not hype. That’s evolution.
It’s the subconscious mind rebelling against identity inertia. It’s human firmware realizing, “Wait—I don’t have to be my role anymore. I can just start doing things.”
The younger crowd feels this instinctively. They were raised in a world that changes weekly. But the truth is, the people with the most to gain from AI aren’t the twenty-somethings—it’s the forty-plus crowd.
Why? Because AI is an amplifier. And experience is exactly what it amplifies best.
Experience + AI = Unstoppable
If you’ve spent twenty years in any field, you’re sitting on a goldmine of insight, pattern recognition, and context. AI can’t invent that—but it can multiply it. The tragedy would be to watch decades of experience go underused because of a little technological discomfort. The opportunity is to channel that experience into new forms—teaching, creating, mentoring, automating, designing—at scale.
That’s not losing relevance. That’s regaining agency.
Your Role Was a Tool, Not a Definition
It’s time to stop asking AI what it’s going to do to our jobs—and start telling it what we want it to do for our potential.
Because here’s the thing:Your role was never who you were. It was just the tool you used to express what you knew. Now you’ve got better tools.
So the real challenge isn’t learning how to use AI—it’s unlearning how to stay still.
Reclaiming Agency
If you’re ready to stop waiting for permission to evolve, this is your moment.Learn AI. Experiment. Collaborate. Fail fast. Start again.
Whether you learn from me in an AI boot camp or from someone else, just learn—now. Because every week you wait, the gap between those who use AI and those who fear it gets wider.
This isn’t about jobs. It’s about agency.And agency, once you reclaim it, changes everything. AI isn’t asking who you are. It’s asking who you’re willing to become.
And Just One More Thing…
Listen—everyone thinks they know something about AI right now, and that’s great. I don’t want to discourage that curiosity for a second. But knowing about AI isn’t the same as being fluent in it.
If you can’t take an idea—or even just a question—and turn it into something you can build, publish, share, and let people actually interact with, that’s the line you still need to cross. That’s the real goal.
It’s not about writing clever prompts or generating a few paragraphs of text. It’s about getting comfortable enough with these tools that you can manifest your thinking—take something from concept to creation, maybe even in real time.
Because here’s the truth: anyone can churn out AI slop. The internet’s already overflowing with it. But that’s not agency. That’s noise.
Agency is when you use AI to make something real. Something that reflects thought, intent, and your unique fingerprint. That’s the line that separates people using AI from people doing something with it.
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